Coffee Tips with Carlahttp://legacymarketingservices.com/blog
Join us each week for marketing tips to grow and promote your business.Mon, 03 Jun 2019 17:46:40 +0000en-UShourly1
Small business owners wear many hats and one of those usually includes that of “Chief Marketing Officer.
Things have changed.
I am Carla Alvarez with Legacy Marketing Services and each Monday morning I will be sharing a few tips to help you promote and grow your business. It won’t be a lecture, just something you can listen to as you sit down to your first cup of coffee on Monday morning.
I hope you’ll join us. You can learn more about us by visiting legacymarketingservices.com]]>Carla AlvarezcleanepisodicCarla Alvarezcarla@efusionmg.comcarla@efusionmg.com (Carla Alvarez)Legacy Marketing ServicesMarketing tips you can use.Coffee Tips with Carlahttp://podcast.legacymktg.com.s3.amazonaws.com/images/coffee-tips-cover.jpghttp://legacymarketingservices.com/blog
Houston, TXweekly71101458Where Do You Do Business? Developing a Marketing Planhttp://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/where-do-you-do-business-developing-a-marketing-plan/
Mon, 25 Feb 2019 17:26:35 +0000http://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/?p=2059http://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/where-do-you-do-business-developing-a-marketing-plan/#respondhttp://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/where-do-you-do-business-developing-a-marketing-plan/feed/0In the past several articles, we have discussed the steps to creating a marketing plan for your business and questions to ask: what problem you solve, what questions do you answer, and who are the people that you serve. In this article, I will cover the fourth question, and that is, “where do you do […]In the past several articles, we have discussed the steps to creating a marketing plan for your business and questions to ask: what problem you solve, what questions do you answer, and who are the people that you serve. In this article, I will cover the fourth question, and that is, “where do you do business?”

Where and how you operate is one of the key elements in creating a successful marketing strategy. Some refer to this stage as identifying the competition or developing a competitive analysis, but fully answering this question involves more than this.

Sales Channels

The first step in assessing where you do business is identifying your sales channels. A sales channel is:

“A way of bringing products or services to market so that they can be purchased by consumers. A sales channel can be direct if it involves a business selling directly to its customers, or it can be indirect if an intermediary such as a retailer or dealer is involved in selling the product to customers.[1]”

Sales channels could include your brick and mortar store, your sales force, your website, resellers, or referral networks such as those that are common in the construction industry. A simple way of thinking about a sales channel is that it is the way your product or service gets to the buyer.

Let’s use an example with which many people are familiar . . . Girl Scout cookies. A Girl Scout troop and the individual Girl Scout has five sales channels to use in their promotional efforts: direct selling going door-to-door, selling through their social media profiles, selling through their online cookie sales page, and selling at cookie booths.

Looking at a restaurant as another example, the majority of their sales will very likely be through their brick and mortar location with customers walking in to dine. However, they might also have an online ordering and delivery service, which would be a second channel, and participate in services like GrubHub and UberEats as a third and fourth. Then they have a catering service promoted by a catering manager giving them a total of five channels.

Each of these sales channels may have different costs associated with them and the dynamics of the selling environment may be very different. Once you have identified the sales channels for each of your products and services, the next step is to analyze the sales environment for each of those sales channels.

Operating in Community

Every business operates in one or more communities. I like this definition of community, “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.[2]” A community is not just a location, but a binding element among the group. Each of your sales channels will be operating within a unique community. For example, a brick and mortar store will be operating in a community defined by its physical location. A company that wholesales their product will be operating in a community defined by industry rather than solely geographic location (although location will likely also influence sales).

An online sales channel will operate in its own unique community . . . no one competes against the entirety of the internet. This community may be defined by a network of blogger or influencers. The online community in which a local business competes may be made up of feedback on online community forums for the local area, community websites, and reviews on Yelp, Google, and Facebook. When someone enters the digital counterpart to a geographic community, who are the players and where is the information found?

Competition

After you have identified each sales channel and defined each community for each channel, the next step is to identify and analyze the competition in each space. This may seem straightforward, but often competitors are overlooked.

Let’s look at a housecleaning service, which can’t be ordered online or fulfilled by a company out of the area. A housecleaner will be competing against other housecleaning businesses which will be listed in business directories, but they will also be competing against individuals who clean as a side gig, high school or college students cleaning houses as a summer job, and the largest group . . . homeowners who clean their homes themselves. When developing a marketing campaign, these different competitors require a different strategy.

When presenting the advantages of working with your business versus another housecleaning business, you might focus on your reputation, longevity in the community, and value (which is not always the same as price.) For those potential customers considering hiring a nonprofessional, you might stress your industry associations, experience, reliability ratings, as well as your bonding and insurance. A campaign targeted towards overwhelmed homeowners cleaning their own homes might focus on the ease and relief of hiring a professional.

Once you’ve identified your competition, look at their strengths and weaknesses. What is the makeup of the company, including its size, ownership, and management? What product or service do they offer and how does it compare to yours? What is the competitor’s reputation in the community and what partnerships or affiliations does that competitor have that affects the competitive space? Finally, what promotional strategies are they using and can you estimate their market share?

Identifying the opportunities

Now that you have thoroughly analyzed your sales channels, the community, and your competition, you should have both a feel for the competitive environment as well as some hard numbers. As you researched, what competitive opportunities surfaced? Is there a pocket of the market where you could focus? On the flip side, where are your own business’s areas of weakness and where do you need to improve?

This may seem like a lot of work to develop a marketing plan, but these are all questions that have to be answered to have an effective campaign. Do you begin to see how of these details play a role in developing a message that will speak to your potential customer or client? It does take time but it is important to go through.

In the case of a competitive environment, the group is made up of entities and organizations.

]]>In the past several articles, we have discussed the steps to creating a marketing plan for your business and questions to ask: what problem you solve, what questions do you answer, and who are the people that you serve. In this article,Carla Alvarezclean7:132059Who are the People You Serve? Developing a Marketing Planhttp://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/who-are-the-people-you-serve-developing-a-marketing-plan/
Thu, 14 Feb 2019 14:43:14 +0000http://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/?p=2053http://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/who-are-the-people-you-serve-developing-a-marketing-plan/#respondhttp://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/who-are-the-people-you-serve-developing-a-marketing-plan/feed/0One of the key elements in developing a marketing plan is identifying the people your business serves and using that to craft your content and marketing plan. Previously, we identified the problems that you solve and we looked at the different ways to identify the problem, or pain points, of your customers. What motivates them […]One of the key elements in developing a marketing plan is identifying the people your business serves and using that to craft your content and marketing plan. Previously, we identified the problems that you solve and we looked at the different ways to identify the problem, or pain points, of your customers. What motivates them to buy your product or service.

Taking Example from Fiction

In the next step, we are going to identify your ideal customer or client, often this is described as a “buyer persona.”

When you write a novel, you develop characters and great characters are fully fleshed out, at least in the author’s mind even if all those details don’t immediately present themselves on the page. Good characters have a backstory, the author knows where they grew up, the composition of their family, their likes and dislikes, their career history, and how they interact with their friends. When an author has a fully fleshed out character, how they react to a particular situation has a ring of authenticity. When we read The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, we can anticipate how characters will react in a situation because he has painted such a clear picture of who they are. His world building was far more extensive than the novels themselves.

Buyer Persona Goals

You don’t have to go to Tolkien lengths in developing your buyer personas, but you do want to go into enough detail that those personas can serve as a guideline for creating your content and marketing strategies. The goal of the buyer persona is to help you create effective communication to that ideal buyer. Whatever you write or create should be developed with one of those personas in mind. For every product or service line that your business has, you have one or more types of buyers. There may be overlap between those types, but often the buyer groups can be extremely different.

Buyer Persona Templates

Creating a buyer persona template can help you work through and define the characteristics of each type of buyer.

Title the persona, begin to describe that person. Who are they? What is their background? In what demographic group do they fall? What are their core values and how do they think about things? What are their interests and affiliations, for example, are they a member of any professional organizations or do they come to you from a specific community or group? How do they like to communicate? Millennials and younger will prefer texts while Boomers will prefer a phone call, or better yet, a face-to-face contact.[1]

Next, consider what that buyer is looking for and what they will take into consideration when they make their buying decision. What challenges are they facing that is prompting them to buy? What obstacle might prohibit them from doing so? What are their main concerns and objections? What are their needs, and finally, what is their primary goal for this buying decision?

Once you’ve worked through these questions, identify the primary product or service you offer that they would be interested in. After you’ve “gotten into the head” of this buyer persona, you will probably also have a pretty good idea of what their primary motivation is in their purchasing decision.

Finally, articulate why this particular type of buyer will buy from you over a competitor.

Buyer Persona Matrix

Now that you have your clearly defined buyer personas, it’s time to distill that information down into a buyer persona matrix as an easily accessed reference. This will be used as you develop your marketing campaigns and individual promotional pieces.

Create a chart with the name of each of your buyer personas along the top. In each line, list the core characteristics to keep in mind.

If you are a B2B company, the items on the characteristics axis might include the position of the person, their background, their needs, goals, and main challenges. A business to consumer company might include gender, age, the product line, the social media network that persona prefers, “hot buttons,” and relevant hashtags.

There is no hard and fast rule on how a buyer persona matrix must be. It is a tool to keep your messaging on point.

]]>One of the key elements in developing a marketing plan is identifying the people your business serves and using that to craft your content and marketing plan. Previously, we identified the problems that you solve and we looked at the different ways to ...Carla Alvarezclean5:402053What Types of Questions Do You Answer: Developing a Marketing Planhttp://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/marketing-plan-what-questions-do-you-answer/
Mon, 14 Jan 2019 22:46:00 +0000http://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/?p=1966http://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/marketing-plan-what-questions-do-you-answer/#respondhttp://legacymarketingservices.com/blog/podcast/marketing-plan-what-questions-do-you-answer/feed/0

Today we are going to talk about what question your business answers. This is related to the types of problems your business solves but it is broader and covers more of the educational aspects.

So, for example, if you have a plumbing business and you are trying to think of topics to include in your content strategy, you can talk about the types of services you offer, the problems that you solve. This is all information that a potential customer might need to know to understand why your service is the best choice for them.

Speaking about plumbing, I was just reading about the situation in Flint, Michigan and their water supply. I think almost everyone is aware that in 2014,[1] there were dangerous levels of lead[2] found in the tap water. There were several things that played a role leading to this: the switching of the water source, the lack of treatment of the water, and the old lead pipes going to the homes themselves that the water leached from. Part of the challenge for government officials was explaining the factors and the problems involved because citizens had to be part of the solution.

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The more complex the product or service you offer, the more important it is to explain the issues related to your industry.

The choices are: explain what you do or be prepared to compete on price alone. There is no other alternative. Fortunately, businesses are able to communicate this information easily through content marketing. This includes articles, informative images, videos, and audio.

The more complex the product or service you offer, the more important it is to explain the issues related to your industry.

The choices are: explain what you do or be prepared to compete on price alone. There is no other alternative. Fortunately, businesses are able to communicate this information easily through content marketing. This includes articles, informative images, videos, and audio.

The best way to determine what those questions are is simply by paying attention to the questions you are asked. Keep a notebook of questions that come up during phone calls or conversations with customers. What are the things that you tell people over and over again?

I have a lot of articles related to domain registrations, not because I focus on selling registrations, but because that is something that has come up frequently over the years: people forgetting to renew their registrations and losing them to a domain squatter, domains being held hostage by a sketchy domain or hosting provider, or being outright hijacked.

Even though the problem my business solves does not involve domain registration, since we develop, manage, and promote websites, having control and proper security on a business’s domain is a top priority. Website promotion doesn’t do any good if those urls are directed somewhere else.

So even if it isn’t something you specifically offer, if there is an issue that impacts what you do, then include that in your potential list of topics.

The second way to discover questions people are asking is to simply look at the questions people use to reach your web site.

This used to be one of the most valuable reports for content marketing. Server statistic programs such as AWstats and Google’s own Analytics service would display the search queries, the words a site visitor entered into the search bar, to reach your site.

However, several years ago, search engines began to encrypt those queries, blocking their display in site analytics, if the user was logged into that search engine. Now only a fraction of search keywords display in your site analytics . . . But use what you have.

The third way to discover the types of questions people are asking is by looking at the suggested search phrases that Google provides with almost every search. There are three places this can be easily found: the list of related searches that displays at the bottom of the search results pages, the related questions that sometimes appear in search results, and in suggested searches that display as you being to type your query into Google’s search bar.

The fourth way you can find the questions your potential customers are asking is by looking at comments and questions asked on forums and social media. Quora is a general question and answer site, but depending on your type of business and where you operate, this might be in topical or special interest forums, in the comments of a popular blog related to your industry, or in a Facebook or LinkedIn group.

This leads to the topic of next week’s article, which is identifying the people you serve. Stay tuned.

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Notes:

[1] Cedric Taylor, “Flint’s Water Is Now Safe to Drink – but the Crisis Has Corroded Residents’ Trust in Government,” CityMetric, last modified May 16, 2018, accessed January 9, 2019, https://www.citymetric.com/politics/flint-s-water-now-safe-drink-crisis-has-corroded-residents-trust-government-3895.

What is the first question that needs to be answered when creating a marketing plan for your business? I’ve talked a little bit about the “Four P’s” of marketing: place, price, product and promotion. These are all important, but there is something else that needs to be analyzed first.

Let’s go back to the definition of marketing, marketing is the process of identifying a need of a particular group of customers and explaining why your product or service is the best solution for that problem. Examining that definition gives us the very first thing we have to do . . . Define what problems your business solves.

Taking a Tip from “As Seen on TV”

Before the advent of the internet, Youtube, and other social media sites, promotion options for businesses were very different. If you were a local business, your advertising strategy likely consisted of ads in the newspaper and the Yellow pages, some occasional mailers, and maybe if you were a larger business local radio and TV spots. Chain stores relied heavily on mailers, and businesses that produced specialty items would advertise in interest magazines.

But what about those weird products that don’t relate to a specific interest such as fishing or cooking and that wouldn’t attract much attention if they were sitting on a shelf in a store? Many of those products found sales through “As Seen on TV,” an infomercial (what is now known as “news”) service that demonstrated the problem the product solved, otherwise known as the “Unique Selling Proposition.”

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One of the most well-known items was “The Clapper” which not only convinced a large swath of Americans that it was simply too much effort to get up and turn off the light, paving the way for Alexa, but it also earned a place in American pop culture with references appearing in movies such as A Night at the Museum and in SNL skits.

The “pain” in these infomercials was often exaggerated, as was the relief at the solutions. Never the less, the ad effectively created the idea that this “problem” was something that could be solved and with just an easy payment of $19.99, life would be a little bit better.

So what is the problem your business solves? If you were creating an “As Seen on TV” ad for your business, what would it look like? What do you want a potential customer to take away from your advertising? What can you do for them?

This is part of our strategy when we work with clients in our “Customer Conversations” program. We identify the hot buttons, or pain points, that potential customers and clients are looking for and design a marketing strategy and content to communicate it.

Being able to articulate the key issues in your industry and how your business effectively solves them is not only important for your general marketing or business plan, it is also critical to understand these points when designing and structuring your business website. Your website should be designed around presenting those solutions. How those solutions should be presented is covered in my upcoming book, 10 Steps to Success with WordPress.

Want to Get Started?

Would you like to start developing your own customer conversations? Schedule a time to discuss content marketing and promotion options for your business

Tomorrow is the first day of 2019. Do you have a marketing plan for the upcoming year for your business? If not, I’m going to cover three steps to creating a marketing plan.As I’ve discussed before, marketing is identifying a particular need in a specific group and explaining why your product or service is the best solution for that problem. We talk about the “4 P’s” in marketing: product, place, price, and promotion. In other words, what you are selling and for what price, where it is being offered and how you are telling others about it (promotion.)Marketing isn’t mystical or mysterious, it is a set of actions taken to achieve a specific goal — the meeting of the customer need — and as a result of meeting that need, your sales goals are reached.

Having defined those terms, how do we begin to line out those actions?

#1 Know Where You’ve Been

If you’ve been in business for any amount of time at all, you have data for a starting point. We have any number of software programs today that make looking at sales and financial data and generating reports easy. The thing is you have to look at them. Those numbers are much more than simply something you compile to submit to the IRS. They are a report of how your business is doing.

When I was in business school, we created a business plan for the university student cinema. We found that the cinema was losing money on every candy bar it sold because it was priced below cost. The students operating the cinema had no idea until they saw the report. At some point, someone priced it and that price was never questioned again.

What were your sales by month? If you offer multiple product or service lines, what was the breakdown of sales between them? Were there variations between months, and if so, can you explain what went on?

Public companies are required to give quarterly reports on their earnings. They have to explain to analysts how their business performed as well as the factors underpinning those results. If you are a private company and don’t have investors, imagine that you have someone to whom you have to give a report.

Create a one page sheet that shows the sales for your product or service (your business lines), your expenses, and the net. Then write a short summary of what happened during the year.

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# 2 Define Where You Want to Go

Now that you have defined your starting point, the next step is to define what you want to achieve. Often, businesses will create long-term business plans, for example, 5-years or 10 years, and then the annual marketing plan is designed to further that long-range plan. However, if you don’t already have one in place, begin with a one year plan. Where do you want to be December 31, 2019?

What are your goals? Maybe you want to increase sales by 20%, add a new business line, or open a new location.

Identify the Steps to Reach Your Goal

Once you know where you are and where you want to go, the next step is to identify the steps needed to reach that goal. Looking back at past and current activities will very likely be your most valuable resource in creating these steps. Look at variations in your sales and your net, both the peaks and valleys. Do you know what caused them? Do more of what worked and less of what didn’t work.

Are there new strategies you would like to implement? There are two ways to increase sales. The first is to get more customers. The second is to sell more to existing customers. It is much more expensive in terms of marketing and promotion to obtain new customers versus increasing sales to existing customers. However, marketing to existing customers is not free and it doesn’t happen automatically. You have to have a plan for that as well.

If you focus on nothing else, my recommendation is to have a solid plan for deepening relationships with existing customers. This is part of the reason we created our “Customer Conversations” program. It is more than content marketing, it is designed to create “brand evangelists” among your customer base.

Over the next several weeks, I will be giving tips on how to use your business website as part of that marketing plan. My book, “10 Steps to Success with WordPress” is coming out in April 2019 and these tips will tie into the concepts in that book.

Tomorrow is Christmas and then we have a little lull before 2019 comes in with a roar.

Christmas is a time when we consider our blessings and show our appreciation to those around us. As I discussed a couple of weeks ago, the focus of your business should not be on the bottom line alone. True success and a lasting legacy is determined by the impact that you make on those around you.

Your Business as a Good Citizen

If you run a business, you have a wide reach. Businesses play an important role in making the community they are a part of a desirable place to live. We have many small businesses in our area that make our community a special place to be by investing in and giving back.

Each business is also a community in itself. As you finish out the year and look at your year-end reports, don’t forget to take the temperature of the culture and sense of community within your business. Is it a place where employees feel valued or is it one where they feel dismissed? Do they come to work and feel like they make a difference and contribute to the common goal or is it a place of stress and contention?

There are times when culture is sacrificed, in an effort to boost profits. This is a short-sighted strategy if your goal is to build a business with longevity.

No One Makes It Alone

We have this idealized vision of the “self-made man,” but really there is no such thing. For every successful person, if they are honest, there have been many hands helping them along the way; whether it was a teacher who took the time to go the extra mile when they were young, friends who encouraged and supported an idea, or a professional mentor that gave a helping hand.

While a founder may have an idea, every successful business is helped along the way by employees who contribute their time and their talent. It is not just about contracts and accounts, the people who help man your ship in the ocean of commerce are just as important..

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Your Business and the Spirit of Christmas

All of us are familiar with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It has been retold and reworked in movies such as It’s a Wonderful Life to countless renditions on Lifetime. The message Dickens gave in the mid-nineteenth century in the middle of the Industrial Revolution is the same one that Jack Welch gives to business owners today, “Put people first.”

As the ghost of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol said:

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.”[1]

Scrooge was given a second chance to make a course correction and adjust his priorities. For the savvy business owner, the welfare of employees and giving back to the community of which they are a part should always be part of the business plan.

Gratitude is Key

Christmas and the end of the year are often a time when businesses give holiday bonuses. However, did you know that compensation is actually not the primary determinant of employee satisfaction? It’s not. Multiple studies have shown that appreciation is[2] the number one factor.[3]

Showing Appreciation

So how can you show your employees that you recognize and appreciate the contribution they make?

Tell them.

Write a card of appreciation and tell them a specific thing that you appreciate about the job they do. This might be when they went an extra mile to finish a job, or when they showed extraordinary patience with a difficult customer. Maybe it is that they do an excellent job training others, or they pay attention to detail.

What is their primary character quality? Are they: thoughtful, considerate, trustworthy, reliable, respectful, humble, compassionate, fair, courteous, efficient, diligent, flexible, focused, honest, determined, insightful, intuitive, creative, persuasive, perceptive, resourceful, imaginative, punctual, or cooperative? Pick one and tell them how it makes a positive impact on the team and in your business.

Don’t send it in a text, email, Facebook or Slack message. Get some pretty cards, grab a pen, and write the note by hand.

When your employees know that you value not only what they do, but who they are, they will want to do their best for you.

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Endnotes:

[2] Jane Burnett, “Employees Treasure This the Most When It Comes to Job Satisfaction,” Ladders, last modified November 10, 2017, accessed December 24, 2018, https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/employees-treasure-this-the-most-when-it-comes-to-job-satisfaction.

Last week we talked about leadership, impact, and influence, today we are going back to discussing the importance of having a plan to promote your business and executing that plan consistently.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that many people feel uncomfortable about promoting their business. The smaller the business and the more necessary the need for promotion, the more likely this is to be true. Many small business owners see their business as an extension of themselves and often see promotion as a form of “bragging.”
I’ll tell you a story that illustrates this. My undergraduate degree is in marketing and advertising management, but I recently completed a masters degree in apologetics. It was quite a different change in track.
There were people from all different industries and backgrounds. A few, such as myself with a business background, attorneys, engineers, and even a former NFL player, but a large percentage of the students were pastors, teachers, and writers. People who work in ideas, not necessarily the nuts and bolts of production or sales.
One of the classes was on communication and one unit in that class was specifically on promotion. One of the books assigned was Platformby Michael Hyatt.
If you don’t know who Michael Hyatt is, he is the former CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. His business was not only about finding good writers but about getting those books sold.
Platformis about building your personal distribution channel. The subtitle is “Get Noticed in a Noisy World.” It is about building a base of people who like and follow what you have to say or offer, or as I mentioned before, expanding your reach and developing those customer conversations.
The book is specifically written for authors, and Hyatt explains the publishing industry, but the principles he covers are good for anyone in business. He tells aspiring authors that it is absolutely necessary that they create their own “platform” or distribution channel if they want to be published.
The publishing industry has changed quite a bit. Traditional book deals where the publisher gives the author an advance and invests in the development, production, and promotion of the book are not as common as they used to be, but authors that have their own developed platform are more likely to receive this.
I know this to be true. I have a friend who is a food blogger who has published online since 1995. She was offered a deal for a cookbook from a publisher because she already has a site that gets a million views a month, a mailing list, and robust social media profiles. Offering a deal to someone like her is a much safer bet for a publisher who is fronting an advance and investing in the development and promotion of the book versus an unknown.
I’ve created marketing pieces for other authors and they have told me the same thing. Even with traditional publishing, they are primarily responsible for promoting their work.

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Hyatt explains why this platform building is necessary and then lays out a step-by-step blueprint for building one. It is an overview, an entire book could be written on each specific element of building a platform, but Platformdoes a very good job of painting the big picture.
Platform was published in 2012 and I took the class in which it was assigned in 2016. There were a few things in the book that I thought were a little dated, after all, online marketing changes rapidly; but overall, all I thought it did a very good job of explaining what and the why of what needed to be done.
When I read it, I thought, “This is an awesome book.”
I was the only person in my class that thought so. Everyone else absolutely hated it. They hated it so much that some wanted to petition to have it removed from the reading list for the class.
They didn’t like Hyatt’s recommendations, even though he had decades of experience in the publishing industry and is a published author himself.
So, fast forward a couple of years and some friends and I decided to start a journal. The first issue launched in April of this year, and just a couple of weeks ago we released the fourth issue titled, Celebrating Planet Narnia.
It is in honor of one of the professors of our program, Dr. Michael Ward, who published Planet Narnia ten years ago. The main idea of his book is that the influence of the seven planets in the medieval model of the solar system are the unifying factor among C.S. Lewis’s seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia. If you’ve read, or watched The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and wondered what Father Christmas was doing in Narnia, Ward explains the continuity in his book.
Included in Celebrating Planet Narnia is an interview with Dr. Ward about the journey the publication of his book launched. This is what he says about publishing a book:

I also feel a responsibility to Planet Narniaitself, if that doesn’t sound like a strange thing to say. But I say it because of something the Inklings scholar, Diana Glyer, once remarked to me about her own (excellent) book, The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. It’s not enough just to write a book and get it published, any more than it would be enough just to conceive a child and give birth to it. You then have a responsibility to give your work ‘a good start’ in the world (by giving talks, recording interviews and podcasts, signing copies, responding to readers), and to do what you can to tend its mid-term development in appropriate ways. . . You get to shepherd your own work for a while, which hopefully increases the chance it will gain a wide and fair hearing and accordingly be able to stand more and more on its own feet. So that has taught me a lot about the job of being a writer; it involves much more than just writing![1]

It sounds like Dr. Ward is saying pretty much the same thing that Michael Hyatt does in Platformdoesn’t it?
The point is, whatever type of endeavor that you have, whether it is a business, a book, an event, or a nonprofit, it is important to nurture and promote it.
So make a plan for that promotion and execute it consistently.

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The past couple of weeks we have talked about marketing and promoting your business, we are going to take a different track today and talk about purpose, impact, and influence.

Last week, we watched the funeral of George Bush, Sr. , he was remembered not so much for political wins or losses, but for a life well-lived and for the family that he loved.

My favorite part of George W.’S eulogy to his father was when he said:

In his inaugural address, the 41st president of the United States said this, “We cannot hope only to leave our children a bigger car or a bigger bank account, we must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood, and his town better than he found it.

What do we want the men and women who work with us to say when we are no longer there. That we were more driven to succeed than anyone around us, or that we stop to ask if a sick child had gotten better and stayed a moment there to trade a word of friendship.

The pastor of my Bible study said this yesterday, “Each one of us leaves a legacy, whether we want to or not. We decide what that legacy will be.”

That is true, we don’t have to be an elected official or a captain of industry to make a difference. Every person has an impact on those around them. As a business owner or manager, you especially play a vital role in the lives of your employees, their families, and your community.

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Success!

In business, it’s important to pay attention to the net, but the income statement is not your company mission, and it is definitely not your life’s purpose.[1]

Jack Welch, the former chairman of GE, talked about that. He took GE through a tremendous period of growth; however, his focus was first on people. His view was that if the company did good by their employees, and the employees did well by their customers and communities, that an increase in “stakeholder value” was a natural result of that focus. This is what he said about it:

. . . And I was asked, what do you think of shareholder value as a strategy? I said it’s the dumbest idea possible. It isn’t a strategy; it’s an outcome. A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message. They come to work every day. It’s tangible. It’s something they can feel and be proud of.

Shareholder value? What the hell is that Larry? It’s the result of you doing a great job, watching your share price go up, your shareholders win, and dividends increasing. What happens when you have increasing shareholder value? You’re delivering better employees to their communities and they can give back. Communities are winning because employees are involved in mentoring and all these other things. Customers are winning because you’re providing them new products, value propositions.

It’s people first. How does your business, and the way you do business, enrich the life of the people you work with, the people you do business with, and the community you are in?

Bob McNair, another big name here in Houston, passed away a few weeks ago.[2] A few days before that, another local business owner died. He owned a yogurt shop here in Kingwood, one that was inundated after the San Jacinto River Authority made its catastrophic release after Hurricane Harvey.

The owner worked hard and brought his shop back into business, but he was fighting another battle with cancer that he didn’t win.

Endnotes:

[2] David Bryan. “Texans owner Bob McNair, who brought the NFL back to Houston, dies at 81.” Houston Chronicle. Published November 23, 2018. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/sports/texans/article/Texans-owner-Bob-McNair-who-brought-NFL-back-to-13417630.php

Today I’m going to talk about the need to include education when promoting your business. I’ve met a number of people who think that if they do a good job and treat their customer and clients well, that it is enough. They shouldn’t really need to advertise or market their business.

Doing a good job and treating people well is necessary, but it isn’t enough. For one thing, people have short memories. That’s just a fact. There will be a percentage of your clients that will keep you in mind and not only come back, but refer you . . . But for the majority, if a competitor puts themselves in front of them at the right moment . . . They most likely get that sale or contract.

The second reason is that very often while your customer may be happy about their interaction with you, they don’t know exactly why or how you served them well.

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I’ll use pool building as an example. It’s hot and humid in Houston and pools are a very big deal. They are also a major investment for a homeowner. Not always, but usually a good chunk of presales time for a pool builder is educating the customer on why certain aspects of construction are important and why they really don’t want to skimp in those areas.

I know several very good local pool builders and we have had very long conversations about their frustration when they spend hours with a customer, only to have someone undercut their bid, and even worse is when they use the design engineered by the builder they didn’t go with.

I feel their pain, I do. Anyone with a business that provides any sort of consulting or strategy has experienced this. It is not just the execution, the plan, design or strategy, is part of the service.

If the service provider can’t be trusted to create the plan, they might not be the best to oversee its execution either. Each element contributes to building the big picture. If that vision isn’t there, the outcome might not be what you think.

Going back to the swimming pool example, we had a house when we first moved to the Houston area with a swimming pool. Coming from a state with much cooler weather, I had no idea what questions to ask or things to examine.

Pools are great . . . When you can keep them clean. In order to do that, sanitation and filtration are the number one priority. Forget the water features, make sure you have a good filter. We did not. We had a sand filter system that hadn’t had the sand changed out in years, but we didn’t know that until we fought a green pool for two years. My friend told me that you just can’t get ideal filtration with those old sand filters anyway.

To add to that, it was a fairly large pool but it only had one skimmer and one drain. Even a good filtration system would have had a hard time keeping it clean. The people who put the pool in obviously were sold on price, they put a big cheap hole in the ground, one that ended up being very expensive and frustrating to maintain.

If the original owners had known the consequences of going with the cheap builder up front, would they have made a different decision? I don’t know, but I do know that if I had known what I know now about pools when we bought the house . . . I think we would have made a different decision about which house to buy.

Your potential customers and clients are not experts in your field. You are. If you are in a business where experience and execution are important, then you, as the expert, need to be able to communicate that.

Before I moved to Texas, I used to be in real estate and I remember spending so much time educating clients one-on-one. Looking at houses was just a fraction of the time I spent with clients. Buying a home is a huge investment, for most people, it is the largest investment they will ever make, so it is important that buyers make an informed decision.

This was before Youtube, social media, and before blogging was a thing. I created home buyer and seller guides to give to people. Today, I would use content marketing: blog posts with tips, an email series for client development, and videos for home promotion and personal marketing.If you’ve researched promoting your business online, I’m sure you’ve come across the term “content marketing.” I call it developing customer conversations. This type of educational information and explaining how your business best fits your customer’s need is what content marketing does best.

How are you communicating your professional expertise to potential clients? Last week, I talked about developing a marketing plan. How does that communication, that content marketing, fit into the plan?

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I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday. It’s Cyber Monday. How did your weekend sales go? Did you implement some sort of customer building effort like we talked about last week? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

Today, we are going to talk about planning, and specifically how to plan out a marketing campaign. My undergraduate degree is in business with a double option in marketing and advertising. My education covered general marketing principles, but in terms of advertising and application, it was focused on working in an advertising agency where you would research and develop a plan over a period of months.

What I’ve found in working with small businesses “out in the wild,” so to speak, is that the majority of them don’t operate that way. They know they need to market their business, but for most of them, that usually means they by an ad or a service if a salesperson happens to hit them at the right time.

That is the extreme end, of course, there are businesses who have more of a plan, but even then I’ve noticed that most of the time, all the pieces such as their website, their social media, their print, and their in-store promotions, don’t all tie together. There is not a single message.

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Because this is so common, the very first seminar I gave was on “how to develop a marketing plan” specifically for small businesses. I want to ask you a question. If something happened to the person who normally makes your marketing decisions, whether that is the owner or a specific employee, would you know the plan for the coming year? Could someone else step in and carry out that plan? If the answer is yes, “Yes, we do have a written plan,” then my next question is, does everyone on your team have an understanding of the activities and goals of that plan? When you play any sort of sport, there is a specific goal . . . An end in mind. Does every person on your team understand the goal they are working towards? If the answer to either of those questions (do you have a plan and is it communicated to employees) is no, some adjustment is necessary. I know one of the things about entrepreneurs is that very often they resist being nailed down to a specific plan or structure. That is part of why they are entrepreneurs, they want to do their own thing and a “plan” can seem so rigid, they like the excitement of uncertainty. What I would say to that is this. Even with the best-laid plans, life will bring enough uncertainty as it is. If you plan and prepare the best you can, you will be ready to deal with the “surprises” that pop up. The other thing I would say is that freewheeling attitude that energizes you as an entrepreneur stresses out your employees. If they were entrepreneurs, they wouldn’t be working for you, they would have their own business. Leaders point to a destination or goal. If you can’t communicate direction, you won’t have the full support of your team. Plans are important, in every area.

Make It Simple

A marketing plan doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to be an elaborate report that an agency would create. It just has to be a plan. When I gave the seminar on developing a marketing plan, we talked about things to consider in the plan, but as for the actual plan itself, my recommendation was to keep it simple. Especially if you haven’t done this before, just get a year-at-a-glance calendar and think about the seasons of your business. When are the busy times of your year? What type of event or promotion will you run for that? Write it down. Think about the holidays, what will you do during those times? What are the slow times during your year? This might be a good time to hold a customer appreciation event or spend some one-on-one time with your best clients. When I work with clients, we usually look at the year in quarters and what we will be focusing on during that time. Not always, sometimes themes or focuses need to be shorter, but that is where we begin. Let’s say you have four major promotions or focuses planned for the coming year, those are your pillars. Everything else that you do will either build up to or follow up on those events: your advertising, your on-site promotions, your content marketing, your email newsletters, your social media postings. Do you see how the rest of your marketing and promotion become much easier once you have the sketches of a plan?